Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Milestones

George Bush is responsible for as many American deaths as the Saudi terrorists who planned and executed the September 2001 attacks on the United States.

There’s been a lot of bitter anticipation of this “milestone” in the blogosphere. Now that it’s here no one really seems to know what to do with it.

To Bush, the ventriloquist’s dummy whose sole purpose in life is to make Alfred E. Neuman and Mortimer Snerd look good, it means less than nothing. All the people fighting and dying in Iraq have never been more than a hazy abstraction to him, about as real as the empty faces Rove hires to shout his praises at photo ops and campaign stops.

To the right-wing wankosphere, our soldiers are comic-book heroes, useful as clubs to bash traitorous lefties. They are not fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters. They’re those little shapeless faceless “troop” pieces you find sealed in a plastic bag in a game of Risk.

There’s been a lot of armchair psychoanalysis done on Bush. There have been whole books about it. A lot of labels have been slapped on him – narcissist, psychopath, sociopath, Oedipal figure – none of it matters. We all know he’s a stupid, cowardly, angry man, profoundly unequipped for the responsibilities he carries. Sometimes such a man will grow under the pressures of office to surprise everyone with his stature and depth.

And sometimes, like Bush, he’ll just grow smaller, meaner, more resentful, more isolated from reality.

As a blogger, I’m supposed to reach some sort of profound conclusion about all this, but I just can’t. There are people for whom peace is anathema. They have been planning and dreaming of this war for years. In 2001, they got their excuse. It didn’t matter that they declared war on the wrong country, for the wrong reasons. It was enough to have a war.

Maybe, just maybe, we can drive these people back under their rocks for a few years. That’s all we can hope for, I guess. Because they never learn, and they never go away. Eternal vigilance really is the price of peace. Because vampires and ghouls are real. They walk the corridors of power and sit on the boards of giant corporations.

Well, that’s about it. I don’t have an ending for this post, but maybe that’s okay. There’s no easy sum-up out there in the real world, either.